Blink

Today Google and Opera announced they would be using a forked version of WebKit called Blink.

My initial reaction is some annoyance spawned from laziness – as a web developer the fewer browsers I have to test the better (I spent a number of years only having to test a single browser, the one 95% of the planet used!), but in reality it shouldn’t create much more work. Modern browsers are all standards compliant; if you write good front end code you don’t really need to worry. The real challenge will now be testing WebKit browsers on PC – since Safari is apparently not getting update anymore.

My real wonder out of all of this is ‘what is Google doing’? Recently they started to sunset Reader (one of the world’s most used RSS feed readers), and other tools like Alerts are flagging. If these services aren’t bringing in enough money to be worth maintaining it seems hard to believe that changing and developing a new browser would be!